X Games Apparel Design

Background

X Games is an extreme sports competition that was created in 1995 by the world leader in sports, ESPN. Similar to the Olympic Games, athletes compete in the the Summer and Winter X Games for gold, silver and bronze medals. Some of the individual events that can be seen are Skateboarding, BMX, Moto X, Snowboarding, Skiing and Snowmobiling.

Story

As an Art Director, I had the opportunity to work with ESPN and X Games for three different events in 2016 (Oslo X Games 2016, Aspen X Games 2016 and Austin X Games 2016). Working with a diverse and experienced design team, I was in charge of overseeing the design direction for the official X Games apparel product line.

Part of my responsibility included looking at past campaigns and creating new concepts that would appeal to the current, Millennial-heavy, fanbase. Slapping a logo on a shirt was not enough – the designs needed to be special and unique to each event. When mapping out the creative plan, I wanted to ensure that we highlighted the host city, national animals, graffiti and typography. Once the creative plan was complete, I worked with my team to perfect the designs with an aim that they could be purchased in multiple colours and styles. I even got into the mix and created a few designs!

We believe that the demand from the X Games’ current and future customers is for personalized products that are not made by the millions in bulk volume. These customers are socially conscious and want companies to be socially responsible in their business practices. Based on this, we recommended that X Games print their merchandise using DTG (Direct to Garment) on a platform that only prints when orders come through; essentially a print-on-demand workflow. Also, this method ensured no dead inventory and zero waste.